I’d favor that idea, except for one crucial aspect.

We’re up to our necks in sucking morasses in both places, and nothing even remotely approximating “victory” can legitimately begin to describe what we’ve accomplished (or, more appropriately, not accomplished).

My mother taught me that allegiance to the truth should always take precedence over blind religious faith or unquestioning fealty to nationalistic myths, so I can’t go along.

Let’s bravely acknowledge, instead, that we got our butts whipped, and announce that we’ll be getting our battered behinds back home, pronto!

If we did so, we’d immediately find that the downward pull of the tar pits in which we’re bogged would ease long enough to extricate ourselves. It wouldn’t be a dignified removal, to be sure, but at least we’d avoid getting swallowed entirely — as both the British and Soviets were in imperialism-killing Afghanistan — when their subjective pride was ultimately, lethally trumped by objective reality.

Getting out now, though far from pretty, would be much better than suffering a catastrophically history-shifting defeat along the aforementioned lines, or the abject humiliation that France endured at the hands of Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu.

Everyone understands that Afghanistan, from the U.S. perspective, is speedily going to Hell in an unraveling hand basket.

But so is Iraq.

Do you not think it’s a sign of failure that our forces there have had to be withdrawn to secure bases beyond Iraqi population centers?

A shameful absence of credible media coverage — or any coverage at all — can’t hide the fact that the last nails are presently being driven into the coffin of U.S. ambition in former Mesopotamia.

Attempting to remain in either country, when actual circumstances powerfully don’t allow it, is an open invitation to disastrous folly.

Republicans argue that we should “do whatever it takes to win.”

What, pray tell, might that be?

We could send to their deaths or terrible maimings just-graduated high school seniors from nearly every town in the USA for endlessly bloody years — at gargantuan monetary cost — and still have just a few blocks of downtown Kabul, or Baghdad, the only safe locations around. Only during broad daylight at that.

Meanwhile, popular antagonism inspired by our heavy-handed occupations would generate fiercely anti-American recruits quicker and more numerously than rain and sunshine give rise to dandelions in springtime.

In other words, we’d just be driving straight toward the ultimate American debacle.

Let’s change the vehicle’s direction, and hold the pedal to the metal as we retreat to rationality and reason.

Our country can save itself from eventual societal disintegration only by completely abandoning its insufferably arrogant, bullying, world-cop attempt to make the rest of humanity over in our corrupt image, by force of indiscriminately discharged arms.

We can’t kill our way to getting others to accept our political, economic, religious, and cultural “values,” which increasing numbers of folks even here at home are rejecting because they’re seen as being hopelessly flawed, if not completely depraved.

Face it. Hardly anyone actually wants to be “just like us.”

And they sure aren’t going to change their minds if we continue to kick down residential doors at midnight or blow up wedding parties with Predator drones, under the cruel assumption that they’re al Qaida gatherings.

We’ve lost. We’ve lost big time.

But nowhere near as massively, tragically, and irreparably as we will if we don’t read the writing on the wall and completely sink beneath that tar, as our purpose suffocates entirely, under the weight of our unrelieved hubris and stupidity.

Yes, the Normandy invasion and the great sacrifice of our own troops was important, but Stalingrad had already sealed Germany’s fate. Thank Russian soldiers for Americans not speaking German, and for U.S. death camps never having been built to “cleanse” our own country of Jews, our racial minorities, plus other “undesirables”.

But that same, seemingly invincible military that saved the whole world some seven decades ago would later be humiliatingly defeated in Afghanistan, repeating Britain’s tragic folly there much earlier.

Afghanistan is the historical death place of overreaching foreign ambition, a reality that stamps a figurative skull and crossbones squarely on whatever vaguely-defined, wishful hope Barack Obama’s Afghan policy possesses.

Put starkly, if we stay in Afghanistan, we, too, are going to catastrophically lose. Think Vietnam, but on an even more disastrous scale of debacle.

Afghanistan combines a just-right amalgam of geographic, religious, and patriotic factors — manifested in the Afghan people’s steely determination to resist conquest, in an ideal defensive setting — to make their land a veritable black hole of doom for foreigners having grand notions of imposing their outside will on a dusty, desolate, yet passionately loved homeland.

Add to that an Afghan continuity stretching back to the beginnings of human habitation on this planet, and it’s reasonable to expect that there will still be an essential Afghanistan long after the USA has morphed, or crumbled, into something pathetically different than its current incarnation.

In fact, attempting to futilely impose arrogant Yankee will on Afghanistan would prove to be a key facilitator of our descent into an American future absent the power and influence, whether real or already largely imagined, that we wield now.

But what of al Qaeda and the Taliban? Are they not scourges that we’re obligated to battle to the bitter end?

Not if the way in which we fight — as alien aggressors in their native midst — provides them additional determination (i.e., a powerful sense of just cause), and our abiding foolishness gives them more recruits than we can ever hope to kill.

How blindly foolish we are in thinking that continued Predator attacks on innocent goat herders and wedding parties can bring us victory.

It’s the same illogic that produced the “it became necessary to destroy the village to save it” madness in Vietnam, and the depraved insanity of believing that constantly kicking down residential doors in Baghdad made us the “good guys” in Iraq.

We have to face facts, distressing though they assuredly are.

The world doesn’t want our religion, politics, economics, or cultural “values” forced upon it, anymore than we’d tolerate some surpassingly hubristic country from half a planet away trying to violently do the same to us.

Twin towers would still be proudly gleaming on the New York City skyline if we had established a prior record of being a true friend and benefactor to humankind, instead of a world-cop bully serving greedily rapacious corporate and financial interests that see Earth’s inhabitants as nothing more than something to be profitably used and abused, or “converted” to what our profoundly problem-ridden society gives us absolutely no valid reason to think anyone else would gladly embrace.

Furthermore, if we scratched just beneath the official story regarding supposedly gratuitous animosity directed against us by so many around the planet, we’d quickly discover that they’re not “enemies” in the diabolical abstract, but people with painful grievances against the U.S. who would have never become such… had we treated them right in the first place.

If we’d only stop getting up in other people’s faces, and quit trying to control their affairs, no one would then stab us in the back when we weren’t looking.

I suspect, however, that we’re too haughty and pious to ever appreciate that truth.

We’ll just self-destructively hurl a monkey wrench into the sputtering engine of our failing order, putting a complete halt to all possibilities for the USA to remain a major power and decisive player in global relations as the 21st Century wears on.

Remember, for instance, when France didn’t support the illegal Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq, a debacle that was incredibly called a “crusade” by our foolish past president, and which has needlessly killed perhaps over a million people.

France and “Old Europe,” where antiwar protests were commonly huge, were condemned by the reactionary Republican base. Who will ever forget the ridiculous absurdity of indignant conservatives renaming French fries “freedom fries”? No wonder goofy Sarah Palin later became their darling.

Well, they’re at it again, claiming that Canadian “socialized medicine” is an unmitigated disaster. It costs a fortune in taxes, they say, and features unacceptable service delays and denials.

But that simply isn’t so, as any fair-minded, honest appraisal readily reveals.

In truth, Canadians pay just a fractionally higher amount in taxes than we do. However, they get a substantially greater public-welfare bang for their buck.

As Rhonda Hackett of the Denver Post put it, “Canadians are afforded many benefits for their tax dollars, even beyond health care (e.g., tax credits, family allowance, cheaper higher education), so the end result is a wash.”

Then there’s the assertion that Canadians allegedly can’t get care when they need it (callously overlooking the plight of 50 million Americans without any medical insurance whatsoever!).

Hackett’s June 7th article also addressed that canard:

There are no requirements for pre-authorization whatsoever. If your family doctor says you need an MRI, you get one. In the U.S., if an insurance administrator says you are not getting an MRI, you don’t get one no matter what your doctor thinks — unless, of course, you have the money to cover the cost.

Most compelling is what a Canadian poster over at Common Dreams recently said:

Last year, I was found to have a genetically defective heart valve that required open-heart surgery. In coming to that conclusion, I underwent several very expensive diagnostic procedures for which there was ABSOLUTELY NO WAITING PERIOD. The operation itself involved a team of surgeons, a team of anestheticists, a team of profusionists and several nurses. Again, ABSOLUTELY NO WAITING PERIOD. After the surgery, I spent ten days in intensive post-op care. The cost in the U.S. — hundreds of thousands of dollars. The cost here in Canada — ZERO.

Desperate to keep their profitable medical stranglehold on the American masses, Big Pharma and insurance giants, with full Republican complicity, are dipping deeply into their bag of dirty tricks.

One of those is a very misleading TV ad currently making the rounds. It features a Canadian woman who went to the United States for purported lifesaving surgery for a brain tumor that Canadian doctors supposedly wouldn’t perform.

In fact, as reported by Julie Mason of the Ottawa Citizen on July 20th, she actually had a “Rathke’s Cleft Cyst on her pituitary gland. To quote an American source, the John Wayne Cancer Center, ‘Rathke’s Cleft Cysts are not true tumors or neoplasms; instead they are benign cysts.’”

The lady was given appropriate appointments with Ontario specialists but chose not to wait the reasonable period. Her resulting surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona cost $97,000.

Interestingly, that case is being pumped by Kentucky Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, whose state has an average yearly income of just over $37,000. It sure looks like his constituents could use affordable health care!

Perhaps the best-stated case for why our country desperately needs health care change came from Democratic Ohio Congressman and former Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, speaking not long ago to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now:

The insurance companies have almost a death grip on our political system. And they can have so much power that they can exclude 50 million people and trap another 50 million in confiscatory premiums, co-pays and deductibles, just jettison millions of Americans into bankruptcy. And yet, we still have this system. And people are saying, ‘Well, you know, we can’t have a government-run system’ Well, frankly, we tried this system controlled by private insurers, and it’s been a calamity for America.

Let’s quite trashing our friends north of the border, adopt what they and the rest of industrialized humanity have done right, and put an end to the grim reality of routinely seeing “spaghetti feed” fund-raiser signs and collection cans at U.S. supermarket checkouts for grievously ill Americans who can’t afford vital, genuinely lifesaving medical care.

And whose names appear next in newspaper obituaries.

Surely the richest country on earth can do better for its populace.

As I later folded them, small tags told me they were manufactured in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Not one item bore a “Made in USA” label, which is very sad, considering that the unionized needle trades were once a bastion of our country’s labor movement, and that finding attire produced overseas was a rarity just a few decades ago.

All this relates closely to the despicable coup that deposed Honduras’ democratically elected president, Manuel Zaleya.

Although the coup’s initiators say they were motivated by other factors, what really spurred their reactionary ire was Zaleya promoting better pay and conditions for Honduran workers in general, but particularly for the virtual sweatshop slaves whose cruel exploitation by mostly U.S. garment firms has been an utterly obscene profit generator for shameless owners residing in luxury in the North.

It would be extremely naive to think those “foreign” companies, along with others involved in banana and fruit growing, did not facilitate the coup in more than minor ways. It goes without saying, also, that U.S. political conservatives, with operative ties to covert Central American intrigues dating back to the Reagan years, are now malevolently present in Tegucigalpa.

Our nation’s anti-democratic, imperialist role in Central America is nothing new.

Countless religious activists, teachers, clinic workers, union organizers, and ordinary campesinos were brutalized by sordid contras secretly armed and trained by the U.S. under illegal Reagan administration aegis during the ’80s.

Much earlier, however, Yankee pillage of Latin America (as well as other world locales) was already standard operating procedure, as starkly exposed by former Marine Corps Commandant Smedley Butler:

I spent 33 years (in the Marines)…most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism…

I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City (Bank) boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street…

In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents.

Progressives familiar with people’s history know about the titanic struggle it took to unionize U.S. labor, lifting largely immigrant masses out of deep poverty, winning them the pay, benefits, and conditions that would shape the contours of our storied “good life”.

They know, too, that the most militant unions were purged and broken during the McCarthyite Red Scare, allowing class-collaborationist tendencies to rise, making the decimation of American labor in the aftermath of Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers essentially a cake walk, much to the profitable delight of corporate parasites.

Now our working class — the backbone of society and the creator of all productive wealth — is losing its jobs, homes, health care, pensions, and collective temper on an unprecedented scale.

The savagely exploitative, intensely destructive Walmart labor relations model dominates U.S. life, and everything we buy is produced abroad in oppressive settings where women and children toil long hours for mere pennies. We (and certainly they) are being ground into the dust as a tiny minority of private “entrepreneurs” live high on the hog, via stolen wealth that properly should be used to improve everyone’s living standards.

But capitalism can’t do that.

It’s unable to function in anything but an increasingly rapacious way, shafting majority wage earners ever more painfully, whether through the acute injustice that leaves evicted families on the street in U.S. cities, or Hondurans fearfully facing military repression and a drastic deterioration of their already desperate existence.

As its growing resort to super-exploitation, dictatorial harshness, violence and war clearly proves, capitalism is the intrinsic enemy — not the ballyhooed champion — of fair play, democracy, simple decency, and peace.

Humanity will have no future worth aspiring to if it stays tied to capitalism’s irreparable flaws and fiercely down-pulling restraints.

The rest of this pivotal century clearly must be devoted to building truly democratic, broadly uplifting socialism on a global scale.

It’s the great moral imperative of our era.

The American anti-choice movement was ecstatic, claiming it represented a tremendous victory for “life.”

In cruel reality, it was anything but.

Completely overlooked was the grim fact that, throughout the impoverished Third World, clinics and other entities offering females vital medical attention were also, frequently, the only sources of health care for the general populace.

Thus, when U.S. assistance dried up, those facilities often either dramatically reduced what already inadequate help they were giving — in areas well beyond just women’s issues — or had to close their doors altogether.

We can only guess how many tens of thousands of people, sick from many causes, either suffered grievously or died because of this objectively destructive policy decision.

Thankfully, Barack Obama immediately reversed Bush’s horrendously wrong-headed prohibition, restoring hope to multitudes around the planet.

But anti-choice zealots, typically bereft of reason and rationality, are now viewing our new President as a facilitator of “murder”!

Their misplaced horror over what Obama did was doubled when the White House also rescinded a Bush-era proscription against embryonic stem-cell research, which is key to possibly finding cures for a host of diseases ravaging the human species.

All the anti-choicers can focus on is their fetish-like belief that even a simple zygote can and should be equated with already-born, living, breathing, socially functioning souls suffering in myriad, painful ways by the millions because progressive socio-politico-economic-scientific notions that would be their salvation are thwarted…by powerful reactionary forces of which the “pro-life” cause is a pivotal component.

We’ve all seen how this de facto barbarism works in our own country.

Women or girls who find themselves pregnant against their wishes and then seek abortions are deemed selfish and irresponsible at best, or full accomplices in murder at worst. Their alleged ethical failing is counterpoised with the heavily emphasized innocence of the “baby,” never mind if it’s just an early-stage fetus.

Always absent from this facile fixing of blame is the possibility, very real in countless instances, that the pregnancies in question might be the result of outright criminal rape, or that reprehensible male exploitation of females for sexual use, the “you’ll do it if you really love me” quasi-crime of date rape.

But we’re not supposed to think of such things. They’d rather have us just drive down the highway and be propagandized by those big billboards of cute babies well past birth happily playing with a top or a ball, in a cynical deception that they’re synonymous with what’s “killed” when a desperate female elects to have an abortion.

And don’t worry about the fact that, even before our current economic meltdown began taking a terrible toll on U.S. living standards, a new American baby was born into poverty every 33 seconds.

That circumstance is in no small measure the result of how conservatives, so piously devoted to embryonic life, commonly abandon all concern for life after birth, as it ought to be properly manifested in governmental/societal programs that would eliminate overall poverty, erase male-female income disparities, guarantee affordable day care and health care, or reverse any of countless other incredibly burdensome injustices that, combined, are a leading reason for females asserting, “No way can I have a baby now!”

Clinging to untenable positions wildly at odds with reality is the anti-choice movement’s sad hallmark, along with incendiary rhetoric that leads to violence against abortion providers.

Comprehensive sex education and ready contraceptive availability would unquestionably result in far fewer unwanted pregnancies, plus a great lessening in AIDs and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The very mechanism that would largely obviate much of their almost hysterical abortion concern, quite incredibly, is actually rejected by the anti-choice movement.

Clearly, abortion absurdity and intolerance need to be firmly resisted.

As anyone who just stops to think for a moment can quickly grasp, it isn’t right for somebody else, for whatever imagined reason, to force another person to not have (or have, for that matter) something so personal and difficult to decide upon as an abortion.

It has to strictly be a matter of each pregnant individual’s own decision, based on her assessment of all factors bearing on the situation.

There should be no Taliban-like moral imperialism that effectively demands, “I know what’s best, and you’ll do as I say!”

No deranged “justice” that kills those who actively prioritize women’s rights and health by appropriately and quite morally acceding to females’ pained need to obtain abortions.

We can respect, however, those who wouldn’t have abortions themselves, out of principle, but who are themselves tolerant enough to permit others to reach a possibly contrary decision regarding their own pregnancies.

May we speedily move forward to the badly needed enlightenment that this whole question unquestionably deserves.

Because it’s intrinsically and irreparably greed-driven, capitalism works at vicious cross-purposes with public welfare and the common good. Not only does its cruelly exploitative nature inflict great harm on multitudes around the planet, its private-profit obsession undeniably takes lives.

Routinely and on a massive scale. Here’s how:

1) By refusing to acknowledge the environmentally hazardous impact of its unchecked productive processes, and by staying loyal to lucrative fossil fuels, capitalism has become a lethal, worldwide generator of greenhouse gasses. While global warming is very real and tremendously deadly, anti-scientific factions of the capitalist elite refuse to concede its very existence, or that their profiteering priorities are its evident cause.

Meanwhile polar bears drown and butterflies perish, as bellwethers of what awaits all life if current methods, and relations, of ecologically unsustainable manufacturing and transit aren’t altered.

2) Unable to derive sufficient profits by exploiting their own labor and domestic natural resources, leading capitalist powers (i.e., George Bush’s USA) launch unprovoked wars of acquisitive, domineering aggression. Poor teens, faced with poverty wages and a widespread lack of civilian opportunity, enlist for manipulative incentives to unwittingly be sacrificed in rich men’s dirty conflicts for narrow, corporate gain abroad. They die, or get horrendously maimed, along with victimized innocents in the invaded countries into which they’re wrongfully sent.

3) Corporations seeking more profit close domestic factories rather than offer their employees decent wages, proper benefits, and pensions. They run away to Third World locales where virtual slave labor is utilized. Workers’ families at home consequently suffer, being thrust into hardship, having to abandon health insurance often when its needed the most. We’ve all seen “spaghetti feed” appeals for donations for those who’ve become seriously ill but can’t afford medical care. Then we see their names again, in the obituary pages.

Meanwhile, the super-exploitation at capitalism’s overseas plants is barbaric. Children and young women must toil long hours for just pennies a day. On-the-job accidents, illnesses, and countless sweatshop fatalities lie behind the cheap consumer prices featured at Walmart and other big box retailers dotting our strip malls.

4) Driven from the land by unfair agricultural competition unleashed through NAFTA and similar monopoly-favoring agreements, rural residents of underdeveloped countries lose whatever scant livelihood they had. They’re forced into the grinding poverty of sprawling urban slums.

In desperation, many of them “illegally” migrate to the U.S. Seeking only food for their tables, they’re castigated as criminals, and have to secretly cross the border.

Many die beneath the searing sun of our savage, Southwestern deserts.

5) Needing ideological underpinning for the male dominance that perpetuates capitalism’s patriarchy and its immensely profitable wage differential between men and women doing the same work, no meaningful concession can be made to the idea of female equality. Thus obtaining abortions becomes exceedingly difficult, if not illegal. Ruling-class men piously decide that fetuses should be granted imagined rights that supersede the very real rights of already born, living, breathing, socially functioning females.

Women confronted with unacceptable pregnancies are expected to carry to term, no matter the threat to their own health, and regardless how impossibly difficult objective circumstances surrounding motherhood might be.

A quarter million girls and women succumb around the world annually because abortion is outlawed where they once lived.

6) AIDS claims millions of lives, especially in the poorest nations, whose impoverishment can be traced to their plunder by capitalist colonialism, and where death by hunger and other diseases is already obscenely high.

Back when the spread of AIDS was greatest — heading toward a grim pandemic — selfish pharmaceutical firms wouldn’t provide affordable or free anti-AIDS drugs to the Third World. Most still don’t.

Meanwhile, here at home, the homophobia that joins racism and related biases as useful capitalist means of keeping people divided…kept prompt action from being taken to combat AIDS. In fact, it was initially dismissed as a “gay disease” and “God’s punishment,” not to be interfered with.

7) How many people die from exposure to lethal chemicals, whirling machinery, hidden poisons, locked exit doors at burning poultry plants, exploding coal mines, improperly inspected or repaired airliners, collapsing bridges, etc., because corporations and corporate-beholden government won’t spend money on appropriate safety measures?

Or because they’ve busted unions and hired scabs, thereby grievously diminishing quality control all around?

Capitalism’s stubborn aversion to “regulation” means a prospective death sentence for everyone.

We could go on and on, but we’ll cite just one more outrageous example. Some months ago it was disclosed that Big Tobacco has been increasing the amount of addictive nicotine in cancer-causing cigarettes, the better to profitably hook youth, who will stand a one-in-three chance of ultimately dying from smoking.

Only the universal implementation of public-profit/populist-democratic/cooperative economies based on shared, lasting well being, not devastating rape for short-term private enrichment, can save us.

And our earthly home itself.

That’s why we should look favorably upon the 21st Century socialism that’s being built elsewhere, particularly in Latin America.

It’s the lifesaver everyone needs.

2) We don’t have souls and don’t go anywhere but into the ground to be eaten by worms when we die. Let’s bravely acknowledge that fact.

3) Quit contending that global warming isn’t real. Except for discredited, charlatan “scientists” of the kind who promote Intelligent Design, the overwhelming majority of truly qualified experts agree that manmade greenhouse gases are dangerously heating the planet. Conservatives can’t bring themselves to admit that “liberals” and United Nations types could ever be correct about anything, so they nay-say, sit on their hands, and would allow their grandchildren (and ours) to ultimately perish, fearfully gasping for precious breath.

4) Nationalism sucks. Belief that one’s own country is better or more important than all others has generated massively destructive jingoism and xenophobia through the ages. Combined with religion, it’s been the chief cause of war for bloody centuries. Join me in pledging to never take up arms against anyone on bogus pretexts — or to imagine them inferior, “evil,” etc. — just because they live beyond the ocean, look strange, and have unfamiliar customs.

5) Let’s jettison monopoly capitalism, which is so parasitically harmful that it makes a starving vampire bat seem benign. If we the people took over the economy, democratically controlling it for public profit and common gain, we’d never get robbed at the gas pump again, pay an arm and a leg for medical care or prescription drugs, lose our homes to usurious mortgage thieves, or get sent off to die in meddling neocons’ criminal invasions abroad. Fire the boss! Become a fair-minded owner of America, along with your fellow workers and neighbors!

6) Stop bashing immigrants. Each of our own arriving ethnic groups was accused by existing nativists of stealing jobs, being a societal drain, having criminal and otherwise unsavory tendencies, or spreading disease, just as mostly Hispanic immigrants are condemned today. Such successive discrimination plainly benefited divide-and-conquer corporate profiteers. It was only when ethnicities, races, and genders united — understanding that an injury to one is an injury to all — that the overall U.S. working class made decisive advances and acquired a mutually better living standard.

7) Admit that nothing worthwhile comes from conservatism. It’s abject selfishness masquerading as a valid ideology. Its sole purpose is to perpetuate minority privilege attained through illegitimate power wielded against consequently suffering masses. Conservatives will never utter the word “justice,” for it’s a shattering indictment of their consistently exploitative role in human affairs. Everything good has been fiercely resisted by the political Right: abolishing slavery and child labor, gaining women’s suffrage, struggling to achieve racial equality, raising the minimum wage, implementing progressive taxation, establishing health and safety standards in the workplace and the community at large, just to name a few.

8) Accept that, while abortion isn’t pretty, it’s often necessary. Furthermore, only each female in each specific, unique circumstance has the right to determine what constitutes a legitimate abortion need. No male, or male-dominated institution, should interfere in this most personal and difficult choice. Before guys say one word about the supposed impropriety of terminating an unacceptable pregnancy, they should produce ironclad guarantees about controlling their reckless libidos and keeping their penises in their pants, if that’s where they’re told they should remain.

9) Repeat after me: “Better gay than grumpy.” The only problem with homosexuality is that some straights, insecure about their own orientation, get uptight over it. Most animal species engage in same-sex contact on a minority basis. Therefore it isn’t “unnatural,” just different, and entirely involuntary, like being left-handed rather than right. Besides, aren’t the last six words of the Pledge of Allegiance “with liberty and justice for all”? Quit being hypocrites and get aboard the freedom train!

10) To nurture the collective human spirit, which is quite different than a religious “soul,” think less about what you can personally acquire, in a material sense. Instead, join struggles for shared prosperity. Know that the greatest reward is giving a deprived child reason to laugh. Honor and guard our earthly home. Lie down beside a blade of grass and contemplate its simple magnificence. Then, when relentless age takes its final toll, buy the farm with a contented smile. You lived well. You did the right thing.

Feed those worms and help make that grass grow!

A few days ago, Israel trotted out only an infinitesimally more credible excuse — the Hamas rockets case — as justification for its own murderous shock and awe in Gaza, a long-planned campaign perniciously aimed at ousting a “regime” that came to power via popular, democratic vote.

Yes, such rockets exist, but they’re little more than slingshots against Israel’s incredible military might, and they’re used out of desperation by Palestinians who’ve never been accorded the democratic space within which to gain redress of their eminently just grievances.

Israeli apologists have presented absurd propaganda about those devices.

We’ve been asked, for instance, what would we do if rockets were being launched on our homes in New York or Texas, from Canada or Mexico?

The proper answer is that, if those two nations had been unlawfully occupied or embargoed by the United States for sixty years of relentless oppression and repression, and if all attempts at peaceful change had been forcefully prevented or scuttled by the U.S., then such attacks would be an understandable, indeed justifiable attempt at gaining intolerably deferred liberty.

Our appropriate response wouldn’t be to bomb the hell out of the nearest Canadian or Mexican city, but to collectively look into mirrors and earnestly ask ourselves, “What have we done wrong to incur their wrath?”

And then act to correct the situation.

Conscientious Israelis acknowledge that the Hamas rockets rationale is fraudulent. For instance, Jerusalem Post writer Larry Derfner has noted:

“We don’t want to see how people in Gaza are living, we block it out of our minds — which, I suppose, is natural for a society at war, but which also keeps that war going longer than it might if we would recognize that Gaza is getting so much the worst of it.

“The [Palestinian] Kassam [rockets] have terrorized the 25,000 people in Sderot and its environs, but have caused very, very few deaths or serious wounds. By contrast, Israel has terrorized 1.5 million Gazans, locked them inside their awfully narrow borders, throttled their economy, and killed and seriously wounded thousands of them…

“This is crazy. Israel is the superpower of the Middle East, but because we still think we’re the Jews of Europe in the 1930s, or the Israelites under Pharaoh, we spend a lot more time fighting our enemies than we might if we looked at the whole picture, not just our half of it . . .”

As Gazan hospitals and morgues fill beyond capacity because of an ongoing air assault that cruelly began at precisely the hour when countless children were heading home from school, we’re expected to believe that small craters mostly in empty Israeli fields constitute this terrible episode’s chief sin.

Bugs bothered by sporadically impacting, glorified fireworks cobbled together in backyard garages are ludicrously supposed to be the primary problem, not human limbs and lives escalatingly shattered by the most destructive weapons that military science can produce!

At any point during the past six decades, Israel could have had peace, simply by assenting to the great moral imperative of our time, namely the Palestinians’ right to their own, unitary, sovereign homeland.

Something that Israel continues to resist both tooth and nail, F16 and Apache helicopter gunship.

Two years ago, in Southern Lebanon, Israel engaged in similar bombings in civilian areas. Then, too, it maintained that only “terrorist” targets were being hit. As impartial observers finally ascertained the truth, clear evidence of enormous civilian carnage surfaced.

The Israeli leadership lied then, and it’s lying now.

There’s a veritable holocaust occurring in densely packed Gaza. Think Guernica, or the Warsaw Ghetto, with all the searing irony that comparison involves.

Apart from being an ethical travesty offending all decent hearts, it’s an unpardonable outrage to especially Arab/Islamic peoples around the world.

Witness the angry protest demonstrations in cities across the planet.

It takes no extraordinary analytical prowess to appreciate that, when the White House ridiculously blames what’s currently happening on “thugs” in Gaza, and when moderate Arab states adopt an accomodationist position pleasing the U.S. and Israel, a profound Arab/Islamic radicalization billows and swells.

New Osama bin Ladens are being born as innocents in Gaza are getting ripped to death by American-made Hellfire missiles, dispatched toward fleshly targets by Israeli pilots.

In fact, the almost certain, counterproductive outcome of Israel’s action makes us necessarily suspect that secret motives mistakenly judged by Tel Aviv to be worth the risk are actually at play.

Three possibilities spring immediately to mind:

1) Obscenely using de facto genocide to give the present Israeli government a “tough” image before upcoming national elections.

2) Roping Barack Obama into a harder pro-Israeli stance than Tel Aviv fears he’d otherwise take.

3) Creating a manipulated, intensely propagandized situation that would enable a desired Israeli attack on Iran.

Whatever the most deeply hidden reality, Israel’s gargantuan crime must be universally condemned in the strongest possible terms . . . and halted at once!

Why can’t we muster a similar sense of finality concerning our popped economy?

Despite joblessness and foreclosures uncontrollably soaring, we still think capitalism has a future. The Big Three auto makers are about to go bust, states and municipalities across the country are broke, and leading retailers are shuttering their doors. Great Depression II looms. Still, we think there can be a “turnaround.”

Not so, friends. We need a brand new ball, and an entirely different, safe playing field.

Well over a century ago, Karl Marx analyzed the contradictions of what we’ve gloriously euphemized as “free enterprise,” and correctly concluded that capitalists are their own gravediggers.

They just can’t stop shoveling.

Private owners of the means of production always seek to increase profit, chiefly by freezing or diminishing the wages of the laboring proletariat, i.e., you, me, and Joe Six Pack.

Ultimately, the boss gets so rich from the stolen value our toil creates, and we so commensurately poor, that we can’t afford to buy back what society collectively produces.

Thus whiz-bang technological gadgets on Circuit City shelves begin to gather dust, and nobody stops by, to buy, at the local Chevrolet dealership. So it goes, throughout the dying economy.

Meanwhile, the boss-class constructs a house-of-cards financial apparatus that gets buffeted by the cross currents of a thousand and one greedy desires, and schemes, leading to an eventual collapse. Even the wealthy wind up losing their shirts.

Picture a stray dog peeing on the ruins of a city laid waste by some terrible catastrophe.

Not much more than that is the best we can hope for by clinging to the capitalist delusion.

During the awful years of the ’30s, FDR thwarted socialist rebellion via the expedient of the New Deal, with its alphabetized public works programs and other initiatives that improved people’s lives enough to keep them from storming oligarchy’s bastions.

Still, while things got gradually better for the suffering masses, it wasn’t until WWII’s enormous armament production kicked in that our country finally became prosperous again.

Barack Obama may put forth a new New Deal, and the relief it would give hard-pressed Americans would be most welcome. However, there are those who feel, with strong reason, that the present crisis will be even more devastating, and longer, than the original Great Depression.

Also, Obama could turn out to be much more accommodating toward even the most reactionary part of the ruling class than we progressive would like. Instead of the big Band-Aid that a fresh New Deal would represent, maybe we’ll get just a bunch of the little, essentially useless ones, applied almost haphazardly here and there.

Other questions: What if war once again emerges as the only real way to fire up the nation’s manufacturing sector? Who would we fight, and at what horrendous cost across the globe? What fraudulent, immoral excuse would “justify” our action?

Wouldn’t it be far better to root out the ruthless motive that drives capitalism, ultimately into the ground, as is happening today?

Why not nationalize at least the key sectors of America’s economy — under popular control — and make public profit the operative factor in our country’s everyday life?

Combine that with coordinated planning and time-tied national goals predicated on serving the common good, and we’d finally be getting somewhere.

You, I, and Joe Six Pack would jointly own America’s productive processes, as well as the banks, and we’d all share in the abundant profit that eliminating thieves and middle men would assure.

No one would get filthy rich, but we’d all live comfortably, with guaranteed health care, education, pensions, etc.

Yes, horrified right-wingers, I’m advocating democratic socialism, something I’m certain Barack Obama is too timid at heart to ever truly embrace.

Yes again, I favor eating the wealthy to nourish the impoverished. That’s far better than the rich endlessly sticking forks into workers, to perpetuate their obscenely privileged status.

Here’s the most compelling case for radical, indeed revolutionary change:

General Motors is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, contending that only a government bailout and/or nullification of its labor contracts can keep it from going under.

No consideration is being shown the good men and women whose blood, sweat, and tears have created the central industrial wealth of America for decades. They’re about to be served up on a sacrificial platter for GM’s executives and shareholders to greedily gobble down.

If the only way capitalism can survive is by robbing taxpayers and hiring low-pay, benefit-less scabs, after unionized workers are callously cast aside, then capitalism unquestionably needs to be tossed into the scrap heap of history.

Remember, iconic GM symbolizes the American way of doing things, and any pattern it sets will be followed throughout the business community.

Must we wait for radicalizing consciousness to emerge only after we’re all destitute and probably homeless?

Or will we now clean socialism of the vilifying mud that’s been long thrown against it, and appreciatively recognize it as our only, true salvation?

I’ve worked throughout my life.
I’ve got kids and a wife
whose fate I’m now so desperately in fear of.
For sometimes factories close,
while that stack of bills just grows,
and there’s nothing you can do for God or dear love.

The mortgage payment’s short,
and my credit card report
discloses that I’ve reached a state of crisis.
We’ve got a little socked away,
but it grows smaller every day,
and I’m haunted by demands of heating prices.

There are beggars on the street
that I never thought I’d meet,
and get to know as brethren in our sorrow.
But the beads of sweat congeal
as I face the facts and feel
that that’s where we may find ourselves tomorrow.

How all this came to pass
is a question we must ask
and find an answer soon, to gain salvation.
Unless we set things right
we’ll just wander through a night
culminating in the doom of our dear nation.

There are hard times in the offing
There is hunger on its way
For the greed of moneychangers
Left a high price we must pay.

There’s a desperation spreading
Like the one that used to be
In our God-forsaken heartland
Back in 1933.

There are eyes all blank and hollow
There are dreams that turned to dust
There’s a fear to face tomorrow
And not a thing that we can trust.

There are children in the schoolyards
Where their laughter still rings true
But their lives will soon be altered
By what a selfish few can do.

There’s a righteous anger building
Right across our tortured land
And a raised fist is the answer
For each worker’s empty hand.

We must seek our own salvation
Like they did in Dust Bowl days
One for all, and all together
With our unity to praise.

I’ll be damned if I’ll accept this
And we’ll be damned if you do too
So let’s rise and Fight the Power
And see our victory through!

Given their backgrounds, neither young person was ever exposed to appropriate sex education.

And, because of who their parents are and what they believe, neither can even begin to consider telling them what’s happened.

The boy just shrinks away and leaves the girl to deal with her “problem” alone.

Having attended church with her family, she’s guilt-ridden by what she’s repeatedly heard about the “irresponsibility” of females (all unmarried women) who allow themselves to become pregnant.

She contemplates abortion, but has been effectively propagandized into thinking that even when a child terminates a pregnancy to prevent having a child — regardless whether the abortion is performed early — it constitutes “murder” in a supposedly nefarious “hidden holocaust.”

Then she ponders running away, giving birth, and keeping the baby. But where would she go, what about her education and future plans, how could she support herself and take care of a constantly demanding infant?

The girl grows increasingly morose. Friends at school notice the change and wonder why, but she’s not forthcoming. Her parents figure she’s going through a phase.

Then, on a Friday night, during her town’s biggest football game of the season, she leaves the filled, brightly-lit, clamoring stadium and walks alone to the darkness of the river just a few blocks away.

Upon reaching its bank, she doesn’t stop walking. She splashes forward, into deeper water, until only her head is above the surface.

The last thing she hears is cheers from the nearby game, then her own gasp, as she vanishes beneath the surging current…

The foregoing is just one variation of a massive human tragedy that’s befallen countless girls and women in America, over decades.

It’s a tragedy that needn’t exist, but does, because we live in a male- dominated society fraught with sexist assumptions and religious absurdities that crash down upon our female populace like a ton of falling bricks.

Quite wrongly and cruelly, many of us place much greater value on the well-being of first-trimester embryos, or even initial zygotes, than on the living, breathing, already born, socially functioning females in whose wombs they reside.

Women’s health — their reproductive rights and choice — are being demonized and obviated, supplanted by almost primitive fetus fetishism, which sees the “baby” as “innocent” against the implied (and sometimes openly stated) view that women who get pregnant contrary to their wishes are sinfully just the opposite… and therefore not worthy of comparable, or greater, consideration

Incredibly, not only is abortion equated with murder, but an overarching conservative failure to accept or deal with human sexuality erects obstacles to the comprehensive sex education and ready contraceptive availability that would vastly diminish the need for abortions, if implemented.

“Abstinence Only” is promoted instead, and commonly forgotten in the heat of passion. It’s also a veritable conduit for the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Those who think that hoped-for iron will alone can stop peer- abetted temptation should note that many of the worst drug offenders we have were enrolled in the “Project D.A.R.E.” anti-drug program as kids.

Yes, abortion remains legal, but decreasingly so. It’s becoming harder and harder to obtain, particularly for poor women and those residing in rural areas. Moreover, we’re just one conservative Supreme Court appointment away from a probable reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Then we’d revert to the bloody, back-alley days of terrible female deaths — in staggering quantity — that we should ask our older female relatives to talk about.

Especially if they were former hospital nurses, they’ll tell us of the real “holocaust” that took desperate lives in a fearful era when female reproductive health wasn’t recognized and choice was outlawed.

Even today — somewhere, somehow — some woman or young girl who yielded to the physical and emotional pressure of a man or boy with just one thing on his mind… is likely involved in dire circumstances at this moment because outmoded attitudes born in a backward, benighted, biased age left her with no options.

Maybe it’s a suicide rope instead of a one-way walk into the water. Maybe her car crashed for no apparent reason. Or perhaps it’s a too-late arrival at an emergency room, following hemorrhaging caused by an ill-advised wire hanger “solution.”

In any case, it’s a loss of hope, and lives, that we can’t morally or practically sustain.

At federal, state, and local levels, please be sure to vote for candidates who advance women’s health and shield female reproductive rights.

It’s the correct, necessary thing to do.

Then a U.S. citizen with abundant Latin American experience appears on screen.

He relates how, back in the early ‘70s, photographs of that same desk were produced to slander Chile’s duly-elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende, who was violently deposed by a rightwing coup in which the CIA and major corporations were proven to have been heavily complicit.

Noriega was certainly an unsavory figure, but his true crime, like that of Saddam Hussein, was that he finally became unwilling to abet Washington and Wall Street’s long-standing, profiteering machinations against his own country and people.

Had both figures remained dutiful pawns, neither would have incurred U.S. wrath, and they’d have been entirely free to wallow in the personal decadence of their choosing, while retaining their status as “friend”.

The Panama Deception goes on to show how hysteria whipped up against Noriega was manipulatively used to completely obscure the Bush administration’s blatantly imperialist purpose, and to hide the terrible fact that a withering U.S. invasion to supposedly “get” one person entailed mass carnage and war crimes about which few U.S. citizens are even remotely aware.

Even though they’re still the subject of abiding outrage in the rest of the world.

“What happened in El Chorrillo in 1989?” is a question that will elicit only blank stares throughout the United States.

That a densely-packed barrio was brutally shelled and burned, at a dreadful cost of hundreds if not thousands of innocent Panamanian lives, has been effectively hidden by our imposed, singular fixation on a particular “strongman,” who’d been propagandistically likened to the Devil himself.

Most Americans will never see footage of whole families crushed alive in their cars by U.S. tanks, apartment buildings being torched in savage succession, or weeping survivors crowded around mass graves from which their blackened, shrapnel-riddled loved ones were grimly extracted.

Likewise, we have no realistic image of what’s actually occurring in George Bush Junior’s similarly misrepresented war, where authoritative estimates put the overall Iraqi death toll at roughly 1.2 million souls.

Repentant Iraq veterans recently tried to tell us about pervasive atrocities they themselves had committed, but their “Winter Soldier” testimony was censored by the mass media.

Meanwhile, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues to be portrayed in that dark light through which we saw Noriega and Saddam.

He’s presented as the epitome of evil, and we’re afforded no countervailing information that might compel us to favor diplomacy over yet another gratuitous, unprovoked conflict in which multitudes of noncombatant men, women, and children would needlessly be killed.

Of course, we’re conditioned to not even think of potential civilian casualties in the countries we attack.

The only deaths that seem to matter are those of our “hometown heroes,” whose sacrifice is always couched in the most glorious terms imaginable, never mind the ugly realities of neo-colonialism being forced on
nation after nation by the objectively miscreant United States.

If only we could appreciate who the “bad guys” in this world actually are.

But no, we’ll evidently continue to send our sons and daughters to kill somebody else’s kids — and their parents as well — just so American plutocrats and gangster capitalists can will exploitatively derived fortunes to their pampered progeny.

No obscenity — certainly not that which was fraudulently attributed to Noriega and Allende via that contrived black-ops desk — can begin to compare to a criminal American foreign policy that’s increasingly indistinguishable from Hitler’s world-dominance ambition.

What have Iranians ever done against us, other than angrily seizing our embassy when we refused to return the hated, deposed Shah to face justice for his copious crimes?

We’re the ones who overthrew Iran’s populist leader Mossadegh in 1953, replacing him with the Shah’s brutally repressive regime. We shot down an Iranian commercial airliner in 1988, killing all 209 aboard. We backed Saddam in waging a devastatingly costly war on Iran.

And now, in preparation for a murderous onslaught that many analysts say will certainly be launched before Dubya leaves office, that same old Panamanian wool is being pulled over our eyes once again.

When will we ever learn?

On the battlefields so brutal
where no angels dare to tread
where the failure of God’s love
can be measured by the dead
we must plant the seeds of peace
and tolerance instead
and not face a human future
every mortal soul should dread

Hear me now, the weary warrior,
who has always gone along
to the sound of martial music
and some flag-embracing song
It’s time to stop the sacrifice
and right this terrible wrong
Through the art of good relations
there’s a new way to be strong

I will not be filled with hatred
for the ones they demonize
I will seek to see the question
through my adversaries’ eyes
I will take a stand for brotherhood
and learn to compromise
We can build a home for justice
where truth replaces lies

See me now, the one who’s fallen,
in unnecessary war
waged in jungles and in deserts
and on every foreign shore
I am rising from the quagmire
and the bloodstained killing floor
and I vow to all who’ll listen:
I’m not marching anymore!

At each US death-toll milestone in Iraq, believers in George Bush’s belligerent policy have said the same thing:

“If we leave too soon, those who’ve fallen will have died in vain.”

What they overlook — or are too brainwashed to appreciate — is that it was evident from the beginning that all Americans who would perish in a surpassingly illegal, immoral aggression cruelly undertaken without any provocation or credible, honest cause…would die needlessly and for abysmally wrong reasons.

In other words, about as “in vain” as you can possibly get.

Failing to comprehend that, they’d keep us in Iraq until the current blood pool became a crimson ocean, and still they’d mouth their falsely justifying inanity.

Thankfully, more and more Iraq veterans and serving personnel are exposing a countervailing truth.

They understand that it doesn’t advance America’s interest to perpetually present to the world (let alone its Muslim sector) an image of the US defined by our troops constantly kicking down residential doors in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.

And then ransacking everything inside, as weeping children cling to their fearful mothers.

As evidenced by the Winter Soldier testimony recently offered by veterans sick of the inhumanity they themselves routinely displayed in Iraq, a growing number of our troops are coming to the stark awareness that, as they search for the “enemy” in trashed Iraqi homes, the real culprit can be seen in their own reflection in broken parlor mirrors.

Consider these words by Michael Prysner, one of the many veterans who testified to atrocities and war crimes at Winter Soldier:

“Poor and working people in this country are sent to kill poor and working people in another country, to make the rich richer. Without racism, soldiers would realize that they have more in common with the Iraqi people than they do with the billionaires who send us to war. I threw people onto the street in Iraq, only to come home and find families here thrown onto the street in this tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis that is already leaving hundreds of Iraq war veterans homeless.”

Some say that disaster would ensue if we “precipitously” departed Iraq, as if the present situation there isn’t already a monumental disaster for Iraqis and Americans alike.

But professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, probably the planet’s leading expert on suicide terrorism, has reached telling conclusions after extensive research, going back many years and involving numerous case studies.

He’s found that terrorism arises, in most instances, from foreign occupations of someone else’s sovereign territory. Once those occupations end, terrorism almost always vanishes.

Moreover, the bulk of Iraqis battling us aren’t terrorists or extremists, but precisely the same kind of patriots we ourselves would be if it were our neighborhoods being vandalized by an invading foreign army.

They’ll relentlessly continue fighting for generations, if we’re insane enough to try to stay that long.

Backers of Bush’s obscene war have their tawdry rationales, and they’re quoted often. But we, on the side of decency and reason, have more powerful words:

“Do not partake in any barren works of darkness, instead expose them.” — Ephesians 5:11

“To sin by silence when the should protest makes cowards of men.” — Abraham Lincoln

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” — Howard Zinn

For more than five years, we’ve let the disguised voice of abject lust for Black Gold lead us tragically astray.

Reality, however, gives a dramatically different account…which we can continue to ignore only at our infinite, collective, national peril.

Government, media, the church, and my schooling combined to incessantly vilify “communist Cuba.”

Castro was the first of many Third World leaders to be demonized by Washington. All of them shared one characteristic that incurred U.S. wrath. They resisted exploitative multinational-corporate control of their economies. They thwarted Wall Street’s plundering ambition.

Despite the relentless propaganda, a measure of instinct survived. Even during the Bay of Pigs, I sensed that the Cuban defenders who triumphed so unexpectedly were, somehow, good guys.

Still, a great deal of confusion remained. Then, a very fortuitous thing happened.

Our family moved into a different home, with furnishings included. Among them was a console short-wave radio. I quickly discovered that Radio Havana’s English language broadcast always came in clearly. I began listening on a regular basis.

Almost immediately, I recognized, through the obviously sincere devotion of announcers and guests to poor people’s needs, that I’d been lied to about what Cuba actually represented.

Radio Havana spoke to troubling emotions I felt for my own country.

Somewhat earlier, I’d gone to Detroit to visit relatives. It was my initial experience with a major U.S. city. My cousin took me on a tour, driving past Ford’s Dearborn plant, etc. Then she drove across the Ambassador Bridge for a brief view of Windsor, Canada. On the way back, as we returned to Michigan and the USA, the first thing I saw was a terrible slum.

What a travesty that such impoverished desolation would be foreign visitors’ first impression of America!

That incident, along with growing awareness of our racial situation, weighed heavily on my soul.

Radio Havana billed its homeland as “the free territory of the Americas.” It always addressed issues of poverty and discrimination, not only in Cuba, but elsewhere, including the United States.

Then I acquired a book of Playboy interviews. Among the dozen or so notables featured, only Malcolm X and Fidel Castro had anything meaningful to say. Other “stars” babbled about trivial matters. But the two radicals concentrated on pervasive social injustice with forthright assessments of the causes and cures.

Eventually, I also became radicalized, not by any individual’s teachings, but by the Civil Rights struggle and the Vietnam War. By 1971, I was so pro-Cuba that I wanted to join the Venceremos Brigades (young U.S. volunteers) to assist the Cubans with their embargo-exacerbated problems.

My job prevented me from going, but I knew several others who went. Their accounts of what Cuban life was really like were profoundly instructive. Fidel was honestly adulated by the Cuban people.

Beyond conquering disease and illiteracy in their own country, Castro’s Cubans worked tirelessly throughout the Third World on similar projects. Cuba also provided armed assistance to people’s liberation struggles. Many Cubans fought and died in Angola and Mozambique, for example, to help defeat the forces of apartheid South Africa.

An obscure piece of history underscores why Fidel Castro is so loved around the planet:

In 1963, the Algerian revolution came very close to being overturned in what was known as the Tindouf campaign. Reactionary Moroccan forces, crucially supported by the U.S., were decimating Algerian fighters — plus countless noncombatants — who had no protective air cover or armor.

Former Algerian president Ahmed ben Bella described the dire situation in a piece for the socialist newspaper, The Militant, “Che Guevara, Cuba, And The Algerian Revolution,” Vol. 62, no. 4, 2 February 1998:

“The United States was clearly behind the Tindouf campaign. We knew that the helicopters transporting the Moroccan troops were piloted by Americans…”

“The Egyptian president, Abdel Nasser, quickly provided us with the air cover we lacked, and Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Raul Castro, and the other Cuban leaders sent us a battalion of 22 tanks and several hundred troops. They were deployed at Bedeau, south of Sidi Bel Abbes, where I inspected them, and were ready to enter into combat if the desert war continued. The tanks were fitted with infrared equipment that allowed them to be used at night. They had been delivered to Cuba by the Soviet Union on the express condition that they were not to be made available to third countries, even communist countries such as Bulgaria, in any circumstances. Despite these restrictions from Moscow, the Cubans defied all the taboos and sent their tanks to the assistance of the endangered Algerian revolution without a moment’s hesitation.”

Conservative Cubans in Miami, whose selfish “values” stem from criminal profiteering by gambling and sugar interests in Havana before 1959, are obscenely overjoyed that Fidel has resigned. Cubans on the island have a word for them: gusanos, or “worms.”

Fidel Castro triumphantly lives on, primarily in the 21st Century socialism that’s being built across Latin America.

He’ll be inspiringly remembered as the most important internationalist of our era, always deeply loving and meaningfully advancing the world’s struggling masses.

When kids who’d left home as gullible believers in U.S. foreign policy myths returned as embittered witnesses to grim truths about imperialism, their family and friends — and complete strangers — were compelled to listen to what they angrily had to say.

Especially when they tossed their medals over the White House fence during Operation Dewey Canyon III, or when they convened the Winter Soldier Investigation, exposing routine atrocities in which they’d been forced to participate.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, and a new activist group of former service personnel, Iraq Veterans Against the War, is arranging its own revelation of standard-operating-procedure horrors, to be presented in Washington, March 13-16, 2008.

Here’s what IVAW has to say about that planned event:

This spring, Iraq Veterans Against the War is revealing the reality of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. In what will be history’s largest gathering of U.S. veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Iraqi and Afghan survivors, eyewitnesses will share their experiences in a public investigation called Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan.

Winter Soldiers, according to founding father Thomas Paine, are those who stand up for the soul of their country, even in its darkest hours. With this spirit in mind, IVAW members are standing up to make their experiences available to all who are concerned about the direction of our country.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time America has needed its Winter Soldiers. In 1971, over one hundred members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War gathered in Detroit to share their stories with America. Atrocities like the My Lai massacre had ignited popular opposition to the war, but political and military leaders insisted that such crimes were isolated exceptions. The members of VVAW knew differently.

Over three days in January, those soldiers testified on the systematic brutality they had seen visited upon the people of Vietnam.

Over thirty years later, we find ourselves faced with a new war. But the lies are the same. Once again, American troops are sinking into an increasingly bloody occupation. Once again, war crimes in places like Haditha, Fallujah, and Abu Ghraib have turned the public against the war. Once again, politicians and generals are blaming ‘a few bad apples’ instead of examining the military policies that have destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan.

Once again, our country needs Winter Soldiers.

From March 13-16, 2008, Iraq Veterans Against the War will gather in our nation’s capital to break the silence and hold our leaders accountable for these wars. We hope you’ll join us, because ours is a story that every American needs to hear.

Recently, not far from here, a young Iraq war veteran fatally shot himself.

He’d returned from combat a fundamentally changed, deeply troubled person.

Before taking his own life, he revealed how he’d been ordered to gun down an unarmed Iraqi man who was approaching a checkpoint, oblivious to shouted warnings to stop.

The doomed individual turned out to be not just an innocent civilian — probably unfamiliar with the foreign language of alien occupiers — but a physician.

Family and friends of the traumatized soldier urged that he seek professional help for his worsening stress disorder, but he refused, contending it would show “weakness” that the military had inculcated in him was not manly to do.

IVAW’s upcoming testimony will show not only that the murder of unarmed noncombatants in Iraq and Afghanistan is pervasively prevalent, but that returning veterans are commonly so psychologically damaged by what they’ve experienced that suicide or dysfunction leading to disproportionate homelessness, for instance, is almost an expected consequence.

It’s that outcome, exceeding even the illegality and immorality of the initiating policy itself, that constitutes this awful period in our history’s most unpardonable crime.

Please help draw attention to IVAW’s vitally important hearings.

Together we can finally end the ongoing fiasco that’s causing everyone but conscience-devoid war profiteers such terrible harm.

What was being so counter-productively done there by presumptuous, insensitive U.S. agents and functionaries was also being done worldwide. “The Ugly American” answered, decades before 9/11, why our country is hated all across the planet.

Our insufferable arrogance and foreign policy excesses are garnering us record levels of international opprobrium.

We’re not a true friend or benefactor to humanity. We take much more than we give. We force far more egregiously than we gently persuade, in military, economic, cultural, and ideological terms. Global multitudes have become outraged.

We should nose out of other people’s business, engaging them instead only on a completely fair, equitable, and wholly non-supremacist basis.

But Washington incessantly intervenes to facilitate Wall Street profiteering wherever others simply want to be left alone.

We’ll drive expensive SUVs to our own societal funeral because we’ve kept the rest of humanity so impoverished that when poor children perish from malnutrition in distant hopelessness, their parents can’t afford even a donkey cart to take their bodies to the graveyard.

Think of past empires, predicated on profound injustice, that wound up in history’s dustbin. Think about a country whose industrial base has been outsourced abroad, and whose best known, remaining products are the F-16s, Apache helicopter gunships, and terrible bombs that murder civilian noncombatants as Washington tries to thrust its wayward will on understandably resistant humankind.

We Americans have a grandiosely deluded perception of our own place in human affairs. For even the best aspects about our history and ourselves, there are at least as compelling, negative features that are seldom considered.

Take our “noble” Founding Fathers, for instance. Can’t it accurately be said that they were also elitist white men who tolerated slavery, killed Indians, adhered to chauvinistic views, and didn’t want to pay taxes? Those traits have caused widespread suffering over time. Even the shiniest coin has its less attractive, reverse side.

Furthermore, it isn’t our best features that drive America’s current policy, in places like Iraq. It’s self-serving avarice assuming a plainly neo-colonial/imperialist form.

And who are we to blame others for terrorism? Talk about a kettle calling the pot black!

Wasn’t it terrorism when Native American women and children in a cul-de-sac gully, running and screaming in abject fear, were attacked by Cavalry troopers who savagely cut them down with slashing sabers and repeating rifles?

From Wounded Knee to My Lai and Haditha, with mass-murdering stops such as the Philippine Insurrection and Hiroshima in between, honesty calls for shamefully admitting that we’re the leading killer of innocents on Earth.

We see ourselves in righteous myth, but to the rest of the world — the Third World in particular — we’re their harrowing picture of death.

Death from starvation and disease that could be conquered but aren’t because proper development is thwarted by inequitable, exploitative, corporate-enriching relations.

Death by shrapnel and fire when the U.S. strikes back against rebels, always demonized as terrorists, who necessarily fight to end intolerable injustice.

It’s not that we haven’t done good, or can’t do so again.

We once fought fascism, humanity’s worst scourge, and pledged at Yalta and Potsdam to never allow anything so awful to ever surface again. But we did. And the reborn evil emerged within our own borders, nurtured by ultraconservative extremism.

We have it within our populist power to show the world a picture of America others can not only stand to look at, but actually be inspired by.

During this holiday season devoted to peace, let’s not just redouble our efforts to quickly, fully end George Bush’s catastrophic Iraq war, plus thwart an even worse conflagration with Iran.

Let’s also pledge to hereafter present a different face to long-repulsed humanity.

Had we done so years ago, twin towers might still be gleaming on the New York skyline.

The French, in fact, clearly saw no substantive difference between Iraq getting invaded by America in 2003, and Hitler’s unprovoked rape of their own country in 1940.

They also understood the US would disastrously lose its woefully misbegotten aggression. The memory of Dien Bien Phu and the Battle of Algiers gives citizens of France stark insight into colonial (and neocolonial) folly.

History will record that the most pathetic figures of the current era were those propagandized, “proud” Americans who never mustered one iota of critical thought — who placed yellow ribbons on their SUVs and bought jingoistic Toby Keith CDs — and couldn’t see that by helping US neocons try to steal oil from beneath Iraqi sand, they were unwittingly stabbing their nation right in its heart.

Thanks to their blind support for madness that should have been nipped in the bud, Osama bin Laden’s fondest dream is coming true.

He wants to break the American military, bankrupt the USA, pour its sons and daughters into a perpetual meat grinder, eviscerate our nation’s global standing, and give Islamic terrorists abundant basis for telling the Muslim masses: “See, the infidels will settle for nothing less than conquest. Join us in jihad to preserve our culture and faith.”

How ironic that an axiom from Christianity, “Pride goeth before the fall” (to which conservatives are completely oblivious in connection with Iraq), is an extreme segment of another religion’s chief weapon against us.

A careful weighing of immediate versus long-term interests, active diplomacy, the initiation of a fair and just foreign policy, and some measure of contrition for our past and present sins, would totally upset al Qaeda’s plan.

But all that is beyond our president and his fatally obtuse backers.

Not content with finding themselves ear-deep in one Middle East quagmire, they want to rush headlong into another (despite the original bog’s voraciously sucking reality making that desire crazily impractical, if not altogether impossible).

Yes, the Bush Gang is actually planning to attack Iran.

It’s reminiscent of a losing boxer in a long, tiring fight desperately lunging forth with hoped-for haymakers. He just leaves himself open to opposing blows that will drop him to the canvas.

Those who support the existing conflict and look favorably upon attacking Iran fail to make a pivotal distinction upon which everything hinges.

They don’t understand that the US isn’t waging war in Iraq, but on Iraq, and that precisely the same would apply to Iran. That makes all the difference in the world, and it will determine the outcome of both conflicts.

Propaganda absurdities to the contrary, we aren’t fighting al Qaeda in Iraq, but a broad insurgency comprised overwhelmingly of the Iraqi people themselves. Al Qaeda is just an opportunistic hanger-on, like a remora riding a shark. It’s that main rebellion, passionately devoted to freeing its violated homeland from foreign aggressors, that possesses iron will which wavering American public staying power can’t even remotely begin to match.

Just as we didn’t truly go to war against Saddam, but on Iraq itself, the same holds true for Iran.

If and when the US attack comes, it won’t be against demonized Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but on the whole Iranian nation, plus everything sacred and strong in its entire history.

George Bush will find himself not only battling determined, ordinary Iranians, but Cyrus the Great, Darius I, Xerxes, and the full panoply of powerful Persian tradition.

Only a colossal fool would invite a second contest that an already dazed, arm-weary boxer can’t possibly win.

But then, utter foolishness has been Shrub’s tarnished hallmark for a very long time.

What pleasantries might we exchange with individuals who deny the deleterious effect of their gas-guzzling SUVs, or coal-fired plants and factories, even as the earth palpably warms and resulting, unprecedented storms blow up their fool asses?

It’s difficult having nice thoughts about conservatives.

After all, their “philosophy” (which is nothing more than rampant avarice at wild odds with public welfare and the common good) is utterly incapable of meeting humanity’s urgent needs, in any area of imperative consideration.

As a teenager, after the iron mines closed in my hometown and Dad lost his job, I helped put food on our family table by caddying at a country club frequented almost exclusively by right-wing Republicans.

Feeling they could speak freely before a mere bag-toter — as if I didn’t exist, or matter — they revealed the most blatant transgressions against the “values” their Party, then as now, piously professes to champion.

They fully exposed themselves as bigots, womanizers, labor exploiters, tax cheats, frauds, crooks, etc.

I washed their golf balls and handed them their clubs, all the while listening to a litany of absolute un-Godliness actually bragged about by men who control our country, and its citizens’ fates.

At the top level, they’re entirely evil, lucre-lusting con artists who’ll do anything to attain/retain riches and political office. America’s conservative rank-and-file, meanwhile, are probably the worst dupes the world has ever seen.

Together they’re responsible for myriad sins nearly beyond comprehension.

It was conservatism that trussed Matthew Shepard to a Wyoming fence, freezing and bleeding, leaving him to fearfully die alone. All because, in what passes for conservatives’ hearts and minds, having involuntary attraction for one’s own gender is a punishable “abomination,” and because “with liberty and justice for all” supposedly applies only to heterosexuals.

It’s conservatism that bombs abortion clinics, rather than acknowledge that women made unwillingly pregnant by frequently Republican males have a definite, always superseding, and decidedly moral right to determine their own reproductive destiny, as well as assure their vital, personal health.

It’s conservatism that responded to 9/11 by brutally attacking the wrong country (with a crass oil expedient as the unstated rationale), utilizing Shock and Awe to incinerate, not “liberate,” untold numbers of completely innocent Iraqi civilians.

Conservatism is why America is the only industrialized country on Earth without national healthcare. The next time you see a coffee can and a hand-lettered sign at your supermarket checkout pleading for donations for some hopeless individual with serious illness but no medical insurance, thank conservatives for that awful cruelty.

A living wage? Forget about it. The political Right incessantly thwarts giving average U.S. working stiffs base pay above the government’s own federal poverty level. Benefits or pensions? Nope. Those are only for golden-parachuting Big Business/High Finance CEOs.

And what about conservative tax policy?

Lawyers and lobbyists assure that wealthy individuals and profitable corporations enjoy tax loopholes large enough to accommodate a convoy of eighteen-wheelers. Meanwhile, Joe Sixpack has such scant chance for payment deferment that he couldn’t squeeze a Kia Rio through his “loophole” without scratching all hell out of its paint job!

And then there’s conservatism’s “fundamentalist” religion, with its prejudice and smug supremacy sanctimoniously dumped upon precisely the poor, ostracized outcasts that Jesus of Nazareth made a pivotal point of not condemning and always placing first.

Let’s not forget Wall Street.

Conservative traders would be happy as clams if the sub-prime mortgage scam they cooked up hadn’t blown up in their faces. But now that it has, their worry revolves exclusively around resulting stock market “volatility” and “fluctuations” that impact their own earnings. They shed no tears for the multitudes of ordinary, ripped-off Americans who’ll lose their homes because of institutionalized usury fraud.

Conservatism is why “double standard” ought to be semantically amended to either triple or quadruple standard to emphasize the massive hypocrisy that the political/religious Right routinely displays.

No, I can’t find it within myself to say anything good about conservatism.

It’d be easier to laud the attributes of ticks, leeches, and sea lampreys, all of which have a substantially less harmful impact on their hosts.

Conservatism is a shamefully self-serving attempt at holding back change and progress by those who’ve used their dominant moment in time to gain exploitatively derived wealth and power, and who then face the justifiable wrath of their victims.

It’s an ongoing effort by human parasites to perpetuate the blood sucking that grossly inequitable relations between the owning class and the rest of us first gave rise to in the bad old days.

It’s piracy, without wooden ships and cannons, transferred to the modern age. It’s the Robber Barons deja vu.

I have far better things to applaud, and stand up for.

As have all Americans possessing even a modicum of true patriotism and simple decency.